Thank You Tom Brady. Godspeed: It's a Gift to Watch You Play.

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.” --T.S. Eliot

It was January 4^th, 2020, a Saturday night, 11:15 pm or so in the eastern time zone when it all ended. 

When a part of what it means to be a New England sports fan, what it means to mark the passage of time and the seasons and the decades through one player: this expired. No time left on the clock.

Game over. Maybe one amazing career over too. An era perhaps concluded in our lives as citizens of this rocky and Yankee and sometimes a bit cranky part of God’s Creation.

The end of this game was not marked by triumph as we hoped for, nor in victory as we cheered for, nor even in last minute drama as we had come to expect from our local gridiron hero and his team. Nope. 

It ended with an errantly thrown pass, a tip and then a touchdown for the other team.

Thrown by one Tom Brady, New England Patriots quarterback for the past 6,671 days—if you’re counting. Eighteen years, three months and thirteen days to be exact, since Brady stepped onto the playing field as a starter, on September 30th, 2001.  Now six world championships later—the most ever by an NFL quarterback--the very real possibility exists that Brady will not return to the Patriots, to the playing fields we’ve grown so accustomed to seeing him inhabit on so, so many Sunday afternoons.

For the fans, the sadness of the very real possibility that this chapter is coming to a close: we get why it is significant to us, why it matters. Why, even though it is only a game after all, played by grown men in dress up uniforms, with nothing really momentous at stake—why it still stings. He will be missed. For the non-football fan or the casual sports fan consider this: for almost twenty years, almost a whole generation, Brady and the Pats have given us more excitement and more entertainment than we could ever have imagined, and so much more than any other part of the country. Brady and the Pats have gifted us with more reasons to find something wonderful to celebrate and to watch together, especially in the cold of winter, in the dark and the chill.

We had a good ride together. A great ride.

Brady and the Patriots always gave all of us plenty to talk about and read about and argue about and care about.  At its best, sports invite us to collectively participate in a spectacle, in a microcosm of human struggle and triumph. Sports allow us to share with one another other pride of place and the sheer joy of play. Sports is one of the last civic enterprises within which we are still able to agree most of the time, even as so much now divides us in the era of incivility.

Yes, there is the chance Tom Terrific may be back.  Even a chance, God forbid, that he shows up next season wearing a different uniform. Who knows? The sports pundits and prognosticators will write tens of thousands of words and spout endless opinions about what comes next. But for me, for now: it does feel like a last hurrah.

This past Saturday night teaches us that most endings in this life are not fairy tale, nor storybook, nor unbelievable. Granted, Ted Williams, who was perhaps the best hitter in the history of baseball, who roamed left field at Fenway Park for the Red Sox for 22 years, he did get to leave us with a bang. In his last at bat, on a rainy September afternoon in 1960, he hit a home run. 

But most often in sports, as bodies break down, as talents diminish, as dynasties crumble, the end is usually marked by that whimper. Yet that’s not what I will remember most from the hundreds of hours I’ve spent glued to the TV watching Brady, cheering for the Pats at the top of my lungs, or the special times I actually got to see them play in person, at Gillette Stadium. I will remember the fact that for so many years, he and the Pats just made life more interesting, more enjoyable, and more fun.

So, if this is it, thank you, Tom, and Godspeed. You took the athletic gifts that God gave to you and then used them all up, used them well, right up until the last whistle. And best of all, we got to watch. Game over, sure. The last score says it was a loss, but for New England and the fans?

We won.